Cult Classic that preaches to the choir

If you know nothing about this movie, there are a few facts you should be aware of before watching that help mitigate the usual hatred this movie elicits:

1) It had a budget of $700,000. Of that, $400,000 went directly to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, so effectively this movie had a budget of $300,000.

2) It had a shooting schedule of five 8-hour days.

Given these two tourniquet-like limitations, it is amazing that Zappa got ANYTHING done, let alone this final product. A good companion piece to this film is "The Making of 200 Motels" which documents these (and numerous other) obsticles Zappa encountered while making this beast. If Gail Zappa ever gets around to issuing a DVD of 200 Motels, hopefully she will be precient enough to include The Making OF as a bonus feature... but I digress.

Yes, this film is technically "bad," but it's so bad it's good, and it has much self-effacing humor within it about how bad it is. Admittedly, the movie doesn't have a plot per se: it is a collection of "road stories" designed to underscore the central theme that "touring can make you crazy." 200 Motels has a heavy dose of Dadaism, which admittedly I have never been a big fan of, but in this case it semems to work, as it lends well to the budget limitations and surreal feeling of the film. Likewise, much of the score is avante garde neo-classical, which I have never been into (if I want classical music, give me the baroque masters.)

If you are new to the Zappa universe, this probably is a bad place to start, as the film relies heavily on "inside jokes" and references to the previous corpus of Zappa/Mothers musical inventory -- what is known as his "Conceptual Continuity." I GET the jokes, but I've got his entire catalogue, but friends I've shown this to who knew little to nothing about FZ merely scratched their heads with a perplexed look. Tellingly, though, they all admitted they *liked* it, even if they didn't *understand* it.

Obviously, this film is not for everyone, especially those prone to epilepsy (a joke/warning which is made early in the film!) or those who need a linear, well-defined plot. If you're willing to risk something "different," though, give it a try.

zappa for the ages

...when released in the psychedelic '60's, was mentioned as the first piece of "electro-cinematography", filmed in video with electronic effects, and then transfered to celluloid.
A strange and eclectic cast playing strange and eclectic people, the images are varied and held together loosely by a minimal theme. A definite Zappa commentary on life, Amerika, rock & roll, good/evil, man, the devil and the human condition. If you don't like Zappa, you definitely will not like it.
It is as unique as all of Zappa's works, and does not necessarily reflect or relate to any of his previous or subsequent works and has to be evaluated as a statement in its' own right.
See it again and again and again...

-A.Biker

In its sense, criminally bad, but arguably one of the best things I've ever seen

I've never seen anything that comes close. Zappa's Varese- and Boulez-influenced compositional moments are astoundingly beautiful, and the depth of the strangeness of the rest of the enterprise is truly unplumbable. There are a lot of experimentish film exercises somewhat in the same mode, by other people, that came out of the same period, but I've never seen anything in that mode that actually grabs your attention and richly rewards it in the way "200 Motels" does. It kept replaying in my head after my first viewing. I wouldn't be able to name precisely what it is about this delirious haze of a film that gives it its sense of underlying rigorousness, maybe the sheer quality of the music, but there's a real intelligence at work in it or in some manner splayed all over it.